


flee this life, flee this place

by Aja



Category: Miss Saigon - Schönberg/Boublil/Maltby
Genre: Gen, Yuletide, Yuletide 2014
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-25
Updated: 2014-12-25
Packaged: 2018-03-03 09:33:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2846270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aja/pseuds/Aja
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Our children laugh all day, and eat too much ice cream.</p><p>And life is like a dream.</p>
            </blockquote>





	flee this life, flee this place

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Carbon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carbon/gifts).



> Carbon, this is the most depressing Yuletide treat ever, but I saw your wonderful prompt and couldn't resist. Happy Yuletide!

For the first month she can barely look at him. She doesn't have to, very much, because he spends most of his days at the Embassy working on finalizing the adoption and custody arrangements. The boy—she's taken to thinking of him as "the boy" because it seems easier than thinking of him as "his son" or by his name—mostly plays with John in their hotel room while Chris is gone. When she and Chris are both in the same room she avoids talking to him for any reason, letting the wall of her hurt build and build. John tries to talk to her about it a few times, but they are all of them pretty distraught, and she doesn't think John blames her, too much. The first night after Kim died (killed herself, she killed herself, oh, god, she killed herself) she placed a call to home and found herself in a screaming match with her mother as she tried to offer a defense for Chris she didn't feel: no, he hadn't told her about Kim, no, he hadn't known about the boy, yes, they were taking him back to the U.S., no, they didn't have a choice.

"His name is _Tam_ , mother," she had seethed into the phone. "You should be thrilled. You've always wanted a grandson."

She wishes she had meant the words. She wishes she didn't know what a disaster this will be. They aren't equipped for this. Pulling a child who's practically been living on the streets his whole life from a wartorn country; she has no idea what she's doing. She never asked for this. She thought, in the beginning, that Chris was mainly just sensitive and shy. He'd seemed so sweet and gentle whenever they spoke. The war had seemed so remote, so distant. The trauma that happened to other people over in Vietnam didn't seem to rest on his shoulders the way it did other veterans she'd seen. They were men whose shoulders came back permanently hunched, the ones who seemed to still be in the warzone. Chris just seemed so... silent, as if it had all passed him by.

She'd been an idiot. She knows now that silence isn't a kind of zen calm. It's where secrets hide. 

The biggest secret of all is tall for his age, with amber eyes and a huge smile. The boy doesn't seem phased by the evident discomfort all around him. He goes to John easily and sits on his lap. He walks careful paths around Ellen, as if he knows she isn't sure what to make of him. She wants to be kind to him. She knows that she will have to eventually welcome Tam into her life. She expects that one day her heart will thaw towards him, and she'll come to love him like a son. She imagines that might even happen sooner than she thinks.

But at the moment all she can think of when she looks at him is that Kim is dead. His mother is dead, she bled out on a trash-covered floor in a whorehouse in front of her son, all because Ellen had told her no when she had come to her and begged. Ellen, who had more in her life than Kim could have ever dreamed of, had flung her own trauma and shock into Kim's face as she wept for mercy. She had held Kim's own tragic past up to her like a broken and distorted mirror. 

She put the gun to Kim's head and said "Pull."

One day she will have to tell Tam all of this. One day he is going to know that the woman he calls "mommy" killed his real mother, the woman who loved him so much she died for him. Ellen is so sick with grief and anger she can barely see beyond it. Anything would be better than having them as parents, she thinks: a broken, taciturn father who went back to the U.S. and drew a curtain over the past five years of his life; a selfish, hard-hearted mother who had seen in Kim something shameful, as though she were a piece of trash that stuck to her heel, something to rid herself of as quickly as possible.

When her thoughts overwhelm her, she leaves the hotel and walks through Patpong, trying to accustom herself to the lights and the sounds, the greengrocers hawking produce alongside members of the red light district hawking bodies. She tries to imagine Kim's life here, and can't. Being outside is even more overwhelming, in a way: in the hotel, she's just a tourist; outside, in the heat and noise of Bangkok, is a world she doesn't understand, a world she has to understand if she is ever to be a decent parent to the three-year-old waiting in her hotel room.

Back in Atlanta the world seemed simpler—at least her world did. She wonders now how much of that was wishful thinking. Here in Bangkok she finds herself thinking and thinking, obsessing over all the other lives she's written off and neglected to look closely at. She finds herself wondering about things she's never even considered before, things that passed her by without a glance: the march near her house in Selma when she was a teen. All the Tuskegee men sent to die by the government for decades without anyone being the wiser. She wonders about all the other secrets her husband's silence conceals—about all the other men who've come back broken, and the bodies, the stories they left behind. She wonders about all the other things she's still not fully awakened to; she wonders if there's an end to it.

Here on the other side of the world, standing in-between a neon-lit strip club and a yellow produce stand bursting with ripe red rambutan, she sees herself, finally, as she truly is: a part of all the misery that ever was, that will ever be. She knows there is no better life in America, waiting for her or her new companion in grief. There are only more efficient methods of staying oblivious.

Back in the hotel room Tam is playing with a small plastic truck he had taken with him from his mother's room. Despite several decades' worth of geopolitical crises colliding on his shoulders, all he can see is the toy in front of him. He rolls it back and forth; he seems perfectly content.

She goes to him. "You sit here," she says to him in broken Vietnamese, gesturing. "You drive."

She makes a driving gesture with her hands. He imitates it and laughs.

Ellen sits down next to him and thinks about the long drive to come.


End file.
